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Columnist’s rantings are all for naught

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Jonah Goldberg's op-ed column in the Sunday Dispatch, “Gun issue won't help Obama's cause in 2014,” evokes images of Paul Newman in one of his best-known roles as a rebellious member of a prison chain gang in Cool Hand Luke.

Early on in the film, Newman is paired against a fellow prisoner, played by George Kennedy, in a boxing match. Newman is outmatched by the more-powerful Kennedy, and the bout is quickly decided. But with punch-drunk futility, Newman keeps coming back for more of a beating.

With similar futility, Goldberg in his column attempts to recharge the worn-out batteries of an increasingly marginalized, extremist core that stubbornly continues to occupy a prominent role in Republican politics.

He begins his ramble by resorting to a crass and common expletive. He closes the column with the same reference. In between, he lays out a series of semi-coherent, threadbare arguments.

For example, Goldberg states the following: “With the sort of willingness to politicize tragedy that is always denounced as the vilest cynicism when Republicans do anything of the sort, Obama . . . took to the streets and airwaves waving the bloody shirts of Newtown for months (with nary a peep of complaint from the same press corps that routinely denounced President Bush for politicizing 9/11).”

So in Goldberg's fun-house mirror of reality, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's leveraging of the horror of 9/11 to fabricate support for an ill-conceived misadventure in Iraq was just about the same thing as President Barack Obama's push for modestly more-sensible gun regulation in the wake of the nightmare in Newtown, Conn.

Like Newman in his encounter with Kennedy, Goldberg undoubtedly will continue to flail away in futility — double-talking, cursing in print and using tasteless imagery — trying to stir extremist juices, convinced that he's actually influencing public opinion. It is a sad and dispirited spectacle, not dissimilar to the mindless determination of Paul Newman's Cool Hand Luke.

But that's where the comparison ends. Newman and his characters were entertaining and altogether sympathetic. Goldberg, unfortunately, is neither.